Myra Dahgaypaw
Delegate for Virginia
Burma

Myra Dahgaypaw is the Refugee Congress Delegate for Virginia. She is a Karen human rights activist from Karen State, Eastern Burma. She was an Internally Displaced Person for nearly 12 years and a refugee for 17 years until she fled to the United States. She lost many of the people she knew, including but not limited to her own immediate family members, close relatives and close friends due to oppressive torture and killing by the Burmese SPDC (State Peace and Development Council) troops.

Myra became an active community organizer and human rights advocate when she was thirteen years old. Over the past decade, she has been engaged with various human rights issues in Burma as well as serving Karen refugees in the U.S. She is director of the U.S. Campaign for Burma, an organization dedicated to empowering grassroots activists in the Burmese diaspora across the U.S. to rally for human rights, amply the voices of the impacted community and bring an end to the military dictatorship in Burma.

She is also a founder of the Karen American Organization (KAO), now known as the Karen Organization of America, an organization dedicated to working, educating and empowering Karen communities across the U.S. through meetings, conferences, leadership training, networking, community-building and advocacy. Prior to this, she served as a Board Member for the Karen American Communities Foundation, an organization that helps the Karen refugees from Burma who have survived the trauma of resettlement from a jungle war zone to an extremely dissimilar urban culture in the U.S.

Myra has been part of SEARAC’s organizational development technical assistance program since 2012. SEARAC has assisted her with strengthening board structure, building program design and creating an online forum to engage Karen youth to pursue higher education.